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I am running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS updated today.

  • As I tried to start the scheduled back-up (on an external drive), the dialogue box asked me the encryption password endlessly and never proceeded to action.
  • Ditto as I try to start a fresh back-up. It appears to begin but the dialogue window comes up every now and again. At one time it's the dialogue box "Require Password?", at the other time is the 'Encryption Password Needed". So time and time again.
  • If I give in encryption, then the backing-up moves on.

Other information:

  • I have checked this other Ask Ubuntu post to no avail. Mentioning a reportedly promising answer, in my case the folders .dbus, .gnupg, .gvfs are owned by Me, though I don't see any .rnd folder.
  • I have seen that there is a bug discussion on Launchpad. There seem to be multiple causes for this problem.

Constrains to the solution:

  • The back-up files should be encrypted.

  • The back-up location cannot be changed.

  • I suspect that something is wrong with gnupg since I have recently had an issue with Thunderbird + Enigmail (could not recall the correct passphrase and after a few attempts Thunderbird stopped sending out signed e-mails -- not fixed yet).

Questions:

  • How do I pinpoint the cause of this one glitch?
  • What is the solution strategy for this?

Thanks for assisting.

Community
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XavierStuvw
  • 1,591

1 Answers1

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The conflict has been caused by an invalid line in the /home/user/.gnupg/gpg.conf file. This particular line 

pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-gtk-2

had been added by the user for Enigmail to work (troubleshooting item 'Resolving issues with GnuPG 2.x and gpg-agent') and had been worked like a charm for a long time. Apparently there must have been changes deep under that disrupted the harmony of Enigmail (1.9.2), deja-vu (30.0) + duplicity (0.6.23) and gpg (1.4.16).

Commenting out this Enigmail-specific line is sufficient to restore the back-up functionalities with encryption. This is the post's question.

Enigmail does not work satisfactorily whether that line is commented out or not. This is still unresolved.

For this case, there is no issue of forgotten password at stake.

XavierStuvw
  • 1,591